Supply chain and inventory management in general are large industries whose profits depend upon their efficiency and accuracy. Prominent examples include package shipping, airport baggage handling, and tracking of medical equipment and high value drugs. In all these cases it is important to know where the items are located and to be able get the items to a desired destination in a timely, predictable fashion. In current systems it is common to affix bar codes to the items and then periodically scan the items at different locations.
One of the major shortcomings of this current approach is that the activity of scanning the items is labor intensive, so that it is done only frequently as absolutely necessary, and the approach is error-prone (items may be missed). RFID readers are inexpensive and can operate at a distance from an RFID-tagged item, in most cases without user intervention. This means that more frequent scans of the item position are possible which provides not only better tracking of the items position and higher reliability for delivery estimates, but it also allows for faster corrective actions. Most sorting of items is done by humans and it is also possible for items to not be unloaded or to fall off of conveyor belts or even to be stolen in some cases. In current systems it may take a significant amount of time before these events can be reliably detected.
With inexpensive RFID readers it is possible to immediately detect if an item is sorted incorrectly or disappears between checkpoints and trigger an alert so that the situation can be corrected. Likewise, for loosely tracked items such as medical equipment it may be that the item has been validly checked out for use but has not been returned or is needed due to an emergency. An RFID based tracking system can unobtrusively track and then locate the item even if the person who has moved the item cannot be contacted. On many occasions there is also a need to maintain detailed records of the environment around transported items such as high value drugs that must be maintained at a certain temperature during transit.